Up and down... that's how it goes with poker. We only need to have more ups then downs and then we are winning player!.. Today my first session, NL100 HU sucked. I made 2 big mistakes wich costed me a lot of money. I stopped for the day but I just wasn't happy about the way I played. I decided to throw in a 4 table 6-max session and that turned out to be a good discission. I got back up and won all my flips! that was nice!

A graph from today:

Today I started with a few session versus some 40BB shortstackers. It went well, stacked them all. Then against another regular who played pretty well but was calling my 3bets way to much and c-betting his 3-bets and then check folding the turn. I was up about $240 and then I played against another cardrunners member (don't know his username here). We played well together, I started really well and was up about $70 dollar. Then I did 2 stupid plays in bad spots and lost my stack to times. Then on the other table I got sucked out with a 3 outer on the river for a $150 dollar pot.

In total I'm minus $400 today. Pretty sucky but I didn't played my A game anymore after playing to long..

So most important lesson; stop when you play to long and lose a little of focus. It's just costing money every time...

Welcome to my BLOG...

I never wanted to start a blog since I already have so much to do besides that. Let me introduce myself first.
My name is Randy Hereman, 21 years old, I'm from The Netherlands and I'm a professional kitesurfer. The whole year I travel around the world to kite, compete and to promote my sponsors.

In the end of 2006 I broke my ACL (cross ligament) while I was training in Brazil. I needed to go back home and do a lot of physiotherapy. I decided not to do an operation and just work on my muscles. It worked out well but in the end I got problems again and needed to go back to Holland and do an operation.

I got operated in December 2007 and needed to rehab for 9 months. I needed to find something to do, to take my focus off kitesurfing. I did a lot of things but in March 2008 a friend asked me to come with him to a poker tournament in one of the bars in my town. I did well, without really knowing what I was doing and I got 4th. Not bad, just outside of the money.

Ever since I started developing my game. I played in a lot of homegames but wanted to play more and started to discover the pokerworld on the internet. I never really knew what I wanted to do. Tournament here, SNG there and also some cashgames... I did all.... Didn't kept good bankroll management and went busto several times. Good for me I was a good winning player in the live games and that compromised my loses on the internet (cause live there are so many more fish).

After the first month I started to become more serious and started to read books, forums and watch videos. I also enjoyed talking about hands I played on the internet and in other live games with friends and people I meet during my learning process.

After 4 months of playing I got the good news I was able to start kitesurfing again and stop playing poker. I learned a lot in poker, the game but also got a better mindset. I earned about 500$ in the time I played and when I look back at it now, I see that I could have made so much more money if I would have been more disciplined and structured in what I was doing.

After one month of kitesurfing the urge to play poker came back obviously and the idea of making money, playing a game I love and being able to do it all over the world while I'm traveling, sounded really interseting to me. I deposit $650 dollar on my pokeraccount and started of one tabeling on NL50, a game of wich i'm certrain to beat easy.

So then my challange started. I go to Brazil for almost 4 months to train and get back on level with kitesurfing and while I'm here I want to be sure my BR is about $3K by the time I got home (December 22nd). I achieved that goal in no time and I'm pretty happy about that, but still, I'm a little dissapointed because last week it was $5K and this week I dropped down $1300 dollars. Half of it is bad play/tilt and the other half is due bad beats and coolers, wich got me to tilt.

So now my BR is $3.7K and I just moved down from NL200 back to NL100. My main game is 6-max NL but because I'm running so terrible lately I want to change my game a little and get some more HU action. If I lose up to 7BI playing HU I will be forced to play 6-max NL100 again..

Here a quick peak of my graph and stats since I started to build my BR (August 26th, 2008):

15 hands of 400NL, I was tilting a little and the game was so good (3 donks and 2 regulars on the table and I had position on all 3 of the donks). I still managed to get control of myself and force myself out of the game because I was so underolled and playing bad!

As you can see it went down pretty hard these last days.

That's already the end of my first entry! I hope to keep on posting and that writing this blog will help me improve my game and the way I think about it all. I'm also looking for somebody (playing around 100-200NL) who is intersted in sharing some thoughts on hands and other poker topics. Maybe we review some of our sessions and help improve eachothers game. So if you are passionate and you want to improve you game as much as I want to improve mine, don't mind contacting me and we might help eachother.

Good luckt at the tables all!

Randy